That’s how it went on TS but in my mind I was going “Oh fuck, I’m not even sure what’s going on, I’m not good at this FC bit, we only kill MTU’s when I lead a roam”

I basically don’t feel that comfortable yet in the role of an FC.
I like doing it, but I dislike not finding us anything to shoot. It makes me wonder if I’m boring my fleet members, if they’re even enjoying themselves.
I guess it’s partly due to bad luck, partly my fault? I don’t know.

Did a few things in the last week.

We had to go help defend something in null-sec. I don’t remember what because it was so damn boring. It just showed me once more why sov-null is not for me at all. Something about ihub, enthosis and waiting. All of those things are not fun, especially the waiting part, and supposedly the other two translate roughly to the same thing. You wait for things to happen.

I get that some people don’t mind that kind of playtime. Where you just follow orders, wait for the FC to call the shots and undock when you have to, dock up when told etc etc.
I’m not a fan of that. After about half an hour of waiting, finally allowed to undock, we warped to where the so called fight was happening, only to warp away again because our numbers were not needed (WHAT?!)

So that was lots of fun. But not really.

We did a roam the other day. As is usual since that’s what happens about 80% of the time.
I took over as FC for about half an hour. And while I was wondering about my own incompetence we caught an Ishtar, and a bit later a miner. It’s not much but at least it’s not just an MTU.

After that little roam it was decided to “rageroll” the static. Which basically means that we were going to keep rolling the hole in search of targets.

Let’s just say that ended up in me dying.

My death, once more taught me that station games are bad.

Fighting is fun if you outnumber them and even fun if you get outnumbered.
But only if you have a chance to beat the odds. Dying because someone drops a carrier on you or suddenly undocks in the exact counter of your fleet. No fun in that.

Well, it’s kind of funny if they drop a carrier on you to save a mining fleet. That one did make me smile.

But station games, they’re not fun. I don’t like it when people try to bait you into getting them only to then dock up, and undock in something bigger. Either you try and shoot people, or you run like hell. That’s the way it should work, and it does work. Sometimes in your favour, on other times. Not so much.

Next time I’ll just check it out from a distance and if we do get to destroy something on station, I’ll come and help. Next time, I’ll try not to die

Little over a year ago, me and a friend of mine tried to settle in a C4 wormhole. We failed, but it was fun.

In the past few days we got to talking again. He had joined a C5 corporation but still felt the itch to settle in a lower class one. Which brings us to yours truly.

I’m enjoying myself in the Null sec corporation I’m in, however, I have other alts. Alts without a purpose, they are just sitting in shiny ships in Jita or Amarr or whatever other system I logged them out in last.

Which brings us to another little plan that has been forming up and coming to closure. We’re going to try out another wormhole adventure. But this time! We won’t be going into a C4, no we’ll be settling in either a C3 or a C2. Since that’s a bit easier to run sites in solo without having to scan more exits, pay a LOT more attention etc. etc.

We’re currently busy scanning down holes, checking if there’s any activity in them, checking out the planets etc. etc.

Once we find a hole to live in, the move will start. I’m looking forward to starting another adventure in w-space. I have tried before, I have failed, but it was a lot of fun and that’s what matters. And if we can make some more ISK in the process, well, that’s even better isn’t it.

While doing all this I’m also training up an alt as a jump freighter pilot. This was done with the idea that it would make things easier for me to start a little Null sec trading hub in my new home system.

This freighter pilot will also be used as a bit of a service for the wormhole, so two birds, one stone kind of thing.

I just need to learn how it works, but I’ve got Singularity for that, once the skills are trained at least.

Now to figure out if I want to keep producing T2 stuff or if I’m going to be giving up on that. The profit on some of the stuff I made has literally dropped 80% in the past few months, on some things even going as far that the price to sell it, is the same price as the resource cost. Something I’m used to when talking about ships but never about components.

We’ll see what happens, the good thing is, I still have a few other sources of income and I just keep expanding my little empire.

When living in a wormhole, there are a few things you’re supposed to do, or so I’ve learned.

The first one is to always check D-scan, no matter where you are, even if it’s in your POS, you want to check it. The reason for this is that you want to make sure that, if someone just decloaked, you know it. Because most people that live in wormholes fly around in cloaky ships, you never know if someone’s in there with you but you need to check D-scan anyhow.

The second one is to bookmark, bookmark EVERYTHING. You warp to a site? You bookmark it. You warp around planets? Bookmark a few spots so you can go there if you’re in a bind and they won’t be able to find you as quickly if you were to just warp to a planet.

You come into a hole? Bookmark the spot, found an entrance to another one? Bookmark.

It’s a very important thing because when you don’t bookmark certain spots, and you forget a scanner, you’re basically screwed.

And then there’s the lesson that I learned a while back but forgot to use earlier this evening:

“When entering a wormhole, before jumping through, check it’s life.”

I’m sure that those of you who are normal to living in wormholes knows what’s coming next. For those of you who are, like me, not too familiar with the mechanics. I’ll try to explain.

When you check the detailed information of a wormhole, it stated where it leads to (Highsec/Null/Low/Unknown space, which is another wormhole), how much time there’s left before it disappear, because that’s what they do, they disappear. How much mass has jumped through and how close it is to collapsing due to the fact that too many ships went through. And last, what kind of ships that can jump through it.

The time left on one, and the stability of it are very important. If it’s critical it can collapse behind you when you jump through. When the time states that it’s at the end of its life, that means that soon enough, it will collapse. You don’t know for certain when, but it’s going to happen sooner or later.

So when jumping through, you check it, always..

Guess who forgot.

All in all it’s not entirely my fault but still. My friend that I joined up with in w-space wanted to run a few sites since he hadn’t made any ISK in the past few weeks due to IRL stuff like exams, gf agro etc. etc. So, while watching a movie, I said “Sure why not, I’ll join”… We fleeted up and I followed him into our C2… Which was cleared of sites. “No biggy we can still make a bit of ISK in the C1” so we jumped through to the C1. Without checking so that’s where we both screwed up. We jumped to a site in the C1 and cleared it.

After doing so I noticed that I forgot to bring ammo so said that I’d just go back to the POS and pick some up. Cue me flying back to the C1 entrance to the C2 that leads back home.. I come at the bookmark and.. Nothing.

Just a bunch of empty space is staring back at me. Did I go to the wrong bookmark? Was the bookmark off a bit?

These two questions are denial, you’re hoping that nothing bad happened. So I logged in my other account and jumped into the C2 to check up on the C1 entrance. Nada, it was gone. That’s when I told my friend and he didn’t believe me, so of course he jumped to our bm. Said something along the lines of “Fuck” and went to his alt to check too.

We were stranded in a C1.. No biggy, we have probes, right? Right?! Yeah, no, we didn’t.

Oh, another thing to do in a wormhole: “Bring probes!”

So we figured that the quickest way out was to self-destruct.. We did say hi in local, hoping someone would be willing to give us an exit or even probes for a few mill, but no luck. We lost about 200m in ships that night, clearing a silly C1.

Please note; I have tried to make this blog somewhat comprehensive but when rereading it I noticed that it seems like I go from one point to the next without finishing the previous. Let’s just blame this on me being sick and my medication, shall we? Good

The past week I’ve seen a lot of people try out EvE again. Friends of mine, people on forums I’m a member of.

And most of them have absolutely no idea what’s going on. It made me wonder, is this because of the fact that the tutorials aren’t that good. Or is it because in this day and age, people don’t actually read the instructions anymore.

“Do I have to?”

The last time I’ve done the tutorials was over a year ago, I made a new character and decided to kill some time doing them. I can’t remember them being too hard to understand. But are they actually good enough to let someone understand what EvE is all about. Because in the end, the only thing that they do, is show you how to manufacture, how to start a mission and how to mine.

They’re great because you get a bunch of skills and starter ships for your adventure, but then you just get cast into the deep end, with no lifejacket and a basic idea of how swimming is supposed to work.

Which is why about 2 out of 3 people (might be more, this is just a random number I am making up so don’t use this against me) stop playing once they did the tutorials.

Good thing there are people out there that enjoy helping others out, showing them the way and answering questions. When someone asks me something about industry or whatever I do in the game, I try to answer the question in a comprehensible way. I fail from time to time but I’ve had people tell me that they understand the game better because of what I’m telling them. (Do not that I never state that what I tell them is actually the correct thing, I am in fact, a noob)

“Oh, pretty lights”

It’s a shame though that so many stop playing because they don’t know what to do. Or because they’re waiting for that certain skill to finish training so that they can go out and have fun. Which is mostly the point where I tell them that they can have an equal amount of fun in a frigate as in a battleship. More so in fact due to the frigate being a lot quicker.

The problem for our newbros is the fact that they have no idea what they can do. I explain them what I do in the game and tell them that I can help them if they want to go that certain route. But there are so many options to go to, that it can be a bit too much.

Places like E-Uni are nice, but what happens when a newbie doesn’t want to be part of such a big corporation, what happens when he wants to do null but has no idea what the consequences of these things are?

I remember starting EvE without a clue what I could do, I was training everything, because the tutorials never did explain to me that sooner or later, I will regret spending time in training a skill that I will not use.

Makes you wonder though, how can you make sure, that people don’t stop playing. You help them, but where is the line for helping them. You don’t want this to be too easy a game, but you still want more people joining you in your game.

Yesterday was a fun day on EvE. Not only did I receive a few evemails about joining WH corps, I also tried out something new.

Let’s talk about that first. What did I do? Well in a spur of the moment I decided to try and get the last Interbus Custom Office in our system down. I was checking my planets and saw that most offices had already been shutdown except for one. So I asked people in the channel I chat in if they were up to it and after about 20 minutes of me going to Jita in 3 accounts and buying a few “glass cannons” we were ready to start.

Seeing that I didn’t actually know what to use to destroy the POCO and I thought that you might get a suspect flag (can you tell that I haven’t read up on this?) I decided on two hurricanes. Neither of them doing that much damage, one was at 750dps, the other 540dps. The lower DPS one wasn’t able to use T2 turrets so that was why it was a bit lower.

The third account is a newbie 1 month old one that was flying a drake with 150dps.

Suffice to say, what I had was not nearly enough to take it down. Luckily I have people who sort of like me enough to come and help me.

Hey guys, when did we get shadows?

Seeing that we’re all noobs one way or the other, our DPS total was about 3-4k across 6 characters.

While we were shooting at the Office my Industrial character was slowly making her way to Jita in an Orca to buy a gantry and the necessary upgrade items.

When I got back to our home system we were at about 40% shield left. So I did what any person would do. I let my Orca drones fly out. That’s right, we have an orca on our Interbus kill mail!

I’d have laughed if the Orca had the final blow

It took awhile, but I’m pretty happy with the fact that our corporation is currently the proud owner of a POCO. I have no idea how long it will take but I like it because we did something new, and as a group. It was fun.

Yay, building things!

While all of this was going on I was looking at the wormhole mails I got and talking to one in particular. This guy turned out to be fun to talk to and I was planning on sending my application right after we were done with what we were doing.

Unfortunately, this person’s patience level wasn’t very high. Seeing that I was busy on 4 accounts at the same time I didn’t look at my main’s chat window a lot. After a few minutes he started to tell me that I should quit my corporation immediately and apply to his. I told him I was a bit busy and he kept telling me I should quit and that he’s waiting for my application.

Suffice to say that I reversed my earlier thoughts on him being a nice guy. Which means that I’m still looking out for a corporation to join. My forum post doesn’t seem to be too popular. I guess nobody wants someone with +30m SP but absolutely no idea what he’s doing.

I’ve had a few people ask me why I call myself a Noob, when I obviously am not. Or at least not quite. They use the little ISK I have as an example for me not being one. But what exactly defines being a noob? And am I allowed to call myself one?

Those that asked me, are thinking about newb/newbro, as in someone who’s new to the game and doesn’t quite understand it yet. A noob on the other hand, is, according to UrbanDictionary; “Someone who knows little and has no will to learn anymore”

But I don’t like that definition either, because I do want to learn more. I just call myself a noob because I, like many others, know very little of the game, despite having played it for a while now. And despite having experience in things like this. But my noobyness (if that’s even a word) makes for some good writing.. That and I had no idea what else to call my blog so there you have it.

Speaking of learning, I learnt something new today.. That my mission runner is not that well liked by the Gallente Federation. How did I find out you ask? Well quite simply by going to Arnon and having their Navy tell me that they will blow my ship up if I don’t leave their controlled space.

So now I’m training Diplomacy, because I wanted to go do the SOE arc again. That’s something I do every few months, despite it not being of any use to me, I kind of like doing it, it makes me go out of my way to other systems, systems I don’t usually go to. That and I get a bit of extra standing with the Sisters, which is a nice thing to have with the upcoming expansion.

Cue obligated thoughts on ‘Rubicon’

I don’t really have a big opinion about it, I don’t know enough about anything in the game to form one that makes any sense. I like the idea of player owned custom offices in High Sec. I’m one of those that does PI in High Sec, and to me the glass is always half full. So I’m thinking of lower tax rates. I might even be able to place a few of my own in my home system *fingers crossed*

I have no idea what the new structures will mean for me, the one thing I’m afraid of is that the Noctis might be on his way out.

Why? Well, the Noctis is, by far, my favorite ship. It has been ever since I first bought one and started tractoring, if I could and it paid quite a bit, I would be salvaging all day. Right now I use it to follow my mission runner, I pop in, tractor everything to me, salvage and loot.

Come to me my precious

I think I have more fun in that ship than I should be having in it.

Skills are trained, lets see if the Gallente Federation is still eager to blow me up